Ferries, the impossible business

Genoa - The failure of the company GoinSardinia - the consortium of Sardinian operators who tried to enter the world of shipping, but weren’t able to see the season through - is only the last of 17 entrepreneurial shipwrecks in the waters of the Italian coastal trade since the year 2000.

We will summarize the most important cases. Up to 2012, the challenge for those starting out in the ferry business was competing with the state-owned giant Tirrenia, which was generously supported by Italian taxpayers: when free enterprise goes up against state-subsidized, the former nearly always limps away with broken bones.

After 2012 the challenge to Tirrenia remained, but in the form of revolt against its own newly litigious shareholders, in particular against Vicenzo Onorato, the most important partner of the privatized company and the owner of Moby Lines, the largest operator on the Tyrrhenian Sea routes.

To challenge Tirrenia, in 2011 and 2012, Moby and the other major ferry companies tried Saremar, the shipping company that had been transferred from the Italian State to the Region of Sardinia, after a long legal battle over fare increases. A few days ago, however, the Antitrust Authority in Brussels showed that the fleet that Berlusconi-supporter Governor Capellacci wanted also fell into the temptation of government assistance.

Antitrust officials demanded the repayment of €10.8 million that the Region paid to the company, once it has been verified that the payments for ships on the two routes in question (links from Civitavecchia and Vado Ligure) will not be repeated.

The route between Liguria, Sardinia and Corsica is certainly the one that has had the most trouble. Anyone with a decent memory will remember Happy Lines, which was owned by La Spezia shipowner Harry Monducci, with links between the Golfo dei Poeti (Gulf of Poets) and Bastia.

The company was created in 1999 and failed in 2003 after three civil suits which meant seized ferries (the “Happy Dolphin” was built in 1969), unhappy crew embarrassing passengers - although they had permission to run record numbers out of La Spezia for years, traffic which later disappeared from the port.

Happy Lines had a serious conflict regarding the ferry “Gioventù” with Tris, the Genoese company that was in business from 1991 to 2002. It is said that it went under after making the mistake of renting an expensive trimaran for the Genoa-Porto Vecchio-Palau route, which was prudently held by the shipowner Nicola Parascandolo utilising small, low-cost ships up until that point.

Three important Genoese shipowners took over the remains of Tris: Franco Gattorno (now the number one of Fiera), Marco Bisagno (Mariotti Shipyards) and the shipowner Giorgio Messina, who died in 2008.

The company became Enermar, and Onorato also got into the business, but the sea links between Sardinia and the mainland were ceded to the Di Maio shipowning family from Torre del Greco, who after a grandiose entrance closed down the line the following year.

The three Di Maio brothers have been in prison since 2013 for fraudulent bankruptcy. And then the business of the tour operator from Bergamo Marini Travel also went badly, when it tried to compete with Comanav, the Moroccan state-owned equivalent of Tirrenia, with a link between Savona and Tangiers.

Marini Travel rented the ship “Al Salam Boccaccio 98”, which in 2006 sadly became infamous for it sinking in the Red Sea, a tragic incident which cost the lives of over 1,000 pilgrims returning from Mecca.

The conditions imposed by the Moroccan authorities were so constricting that they nearly caused a diplomatic conflict with Italy. What’s more, in 2009, Comanav, which ran a Genoa-Tangiers link, went bankrupt.

A line on which many have tried to succeed (at least as long as the FIAT plant was there) was the Genoa-Termini Imerese route. In the era of Tirrenia, the State struggled with Viamare, which had seven “freight-only” ferries built, but only operated for two years, form ‘93 to ‘95. The Benetton family tried it, leaving the business - for a time - with StradeBlu, and the shipowner Luca Romeo tried it with the T-Link ships between 2010 and 2011 (the same ships were later rented by Saremar).

And there has been no shortage of failures on the Adriatic, either. It is true that Enermar tried operating a route between Chioggia and Spalato, and we are not even taking the companies that were created and failed on the routes between Puglia, Albania, Croatia and Montenegro into account.